To divide

Alexandra Soldatova

A friend asked me what ‘to divide’ means.
To divide means to transform one whole into independent parts. Yet, if we assume the world around us to be a whole, can we identify such entities in it which are unrelated to each other?
I conduct a series of experiments, going from the general to the individual. At first sight, everything seems to be simple: light and darkness, mature and man, the live and the dead.

1

Is it natural or human, live or dead? Perhaps, this is the same question. Art is suitable for asking yourself questions.

2

However, asking myself more and more questions, I have to be prepared not only for unexpected answers but also for their absence, especially as words.

3

For example, is a situation possible when the artificial becomes natural? And just the opposite, when the natural is too alien, is it perceived as non-live and thus artificial?

4

Or, for example, a photograph may make the dead real. Why then is it more interesting to examine it in such a way so that a lie remains evident?

5

A photograph does not care what to show. It will easily connect any non-matching objects in the space of the picture, by colour or by something else.

6

The harder I try to divide, the more connections I discover. What was earlier independent and simple for me, it suddenly becomes part of something, changing itself in my perception.

7

In order to separate an object, I have to look at it at such an angle so that I see no connections between this object and other objects, or these ties become common.

8

The details I mentioned and words by themselves build firmer borders for us than a frame of a camera object finder. Words and our previous experience make the black black, not the absence of light in a part of a picture.

9

Words do not allow us to see: words are a borderline between an object of photography and the experience which can be gained through photography.

10

I try to go even deeper, at least in theory. Everything consists of molecules, but where does one molecule finish and where does another molecule start?

11

Strictly speaking, there is no such a place; there is only an asymptotic ‘tail’, which we ignore in our physics class, in order to simplify it, to generate a model and to think over what is happening.

12

To have a possibility of talking by words.

13

Here is a piece of feldspar, mineral that looks like glass. If we put threads on it, there will be two images under one thread. One is a common image, and the other one is uncommon. Is there the image of the thread lying on a sheet of paper?